Virtual Reality Seeks to Explain 25/9/2017

simonjay (76)in #education • 7 years ago

Hello Steemian so in the last article we asked what does elephants, rubbish and Argentina have in common?
If you missed that post you can still read and upvote it here:
https://steemit.com/education/@simonjay/what-does-elephants-rubbish-and-argentina-have-in-common-25-9-2017

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Anyway so we learned that humans have produced 8.3 billion tonnes of plastics since 1950 which is the equivalent weight of one billion elephants.
As for Argentina well if we were to spread out all of those plastics at an ankle deep level it would cover the landmass of Argentina!!

Approximately 80 percent of it doesn't get recycled ending up in our landfills we are looking at producing around 34 billion tonnes by 2050.
Which is not good.

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The question presented was is this shocking enough to save our planet as the depleting ozone layer, the melting ice caps, the weird extreme weather and the much loss of wild animal habitat doesn't seem enough nor does the reading of this post.

So what can be done? How are we going to educate people our children going forward?

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Well enter virtual reality?

Or shall we say enter Jeremy Bailenson who is a professor of communication at the Stanford University.
Jeremy Bailenson runs a virtual human interaction lab and his team as put together a VR game that seeks to explain ocean acidification but more importantly how it generate an actual active response in those who play it.

The team have previously ran a series of experiments using VR.
The results were strangely striking especially in the actual active response rates.

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For example they discovered when a person had a VR experience of cutting down a tree that the person was more likely to conserve paper.

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They also had the experience of taking a shower and watching their avatar eating the coal equivalent of the energy being used, yes it does sound comical but shockingly they were more likely to conserve water.

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So it seems so far that compared to watching or reading about ecological issues VR is more likely to change the habits for those who experience it.
The immersion of VR with the right settings seems to create a mind-set in users who are more likely to take action after their experience.

How exactly did it work?

Well going back on the experiment on ocean acidification which is the process by which the oceans absorb human produced carbon dioxide which is causing the water’s pH to drop.
What this is doing is its making a radical alteration to the environment which in turn is killing countless of our wild marine life species.

So the created VR experience is of the reef around the Italian island of Ischia, which it is here that the natural effect of volcanic vents create the same acidification as the human pollution ones do.

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So cleverly through the VR game you become a piece of coral and experience obviously a very accelerated version of this process of acidification.
As the carbon dioxide changes the coloured environment teeming with wild life it slowly changes to one that is colourless and lifeless.

This VR type of experience is said to be impactful for instances like this because it’s an environment that most of us will never get to see but yet we all know its happening.
This is kind of like what we said on the previous post about being connected to nature and our own earth and much like the knowing feeling of whats happening with the polar ice caps or the tropical rainforests.